Eclipse of Empires

Eclipse of Empires analyses the nineteenth-century American fascination with what Patricia Jane Roylance calls narratives of imperial eclipse, texts that depict the surpassing of one great civilisation by another. Patricia Jane Roylances central claim in Eclipse of Empires is that historical episodes of imperial eclipse, for example Incan Peru yielding to Spain or the Ojibway to the French, heightened the concerns of many American writers about specific intranational social problems plaguing the nation at the timerace, class, gender, religion, economics. Given the eventual dissolution of great civilisations previously plagued by these very same problems, many writers, unlike those who confidently emphasised U.S. exceptionalism, exhibited both an anxiety about the stability of American society and a consistent practice of self-scrutiny in identifying the national defects that they felt could precipitate Americas decline. Roylance studies, among other texts, James Fenimore Coopers The Water-Witch (1830) and The Bravo (1831), which address the eclipse of Venice by New York City as a maritime power in the eighteenth century; William Hickling Prescotts Conquest of Peru (1847), which responds to widespread anxiety about communist and abolitionist threats to the U.S. system of personal property by depicting Incan culture as a protocommunist society doomed to failure; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellows The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which resists the total eclipse of Ojibwa culture by incorporating Ojibway terms and stories into his poem and by depicting the land as permanently marked by their occupation.